When people want to find out about a product, company or service these days, they typically go online and start with a search in a search engine.
It’s rare for users to know exactly what they want. They may have an idea, but they often need a search engine to guide them.
In fact, research shows that around 93 percent of online sessions today begin with a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo! (Here in Australia, Google is the predominant search engine, with Microsoft’s Bing a distant second).
And that’s why it’s important that your business figures prominently in search engines for keyword combinations that consumers use to learn about your products and services.
Take your business hat off for a moment and think about your own consumer purchasing experiences (we’re all consumers when we’re not running our businesses).
I’m willing to bet that many of your recent purchases — like mine — started with an online search.
Last weekend, I bought a shelter for our family bicycles — I searched online.
My daughter shattered her phone screen and needed a replacement phone — I searched online.
My son wants a popular PC game for his upcoming birthday — I searched online.
My wife wanted to buy a couple of business books for work — she searched online.
That’s precisely where your prospective customers are looking for the products and services they wish to purchase.
And when consumers search Google, they typically don’t go further than the first couple of search results — in fact, more than 90% of traffic goes to websites that rank on the first page of the search results.
That’s where you need to be.
In this day and age, winning businesses are businesses that can be found easily in search engines, whether it’s to purchase a product online or to find a local provider nearby.
How do I get my business listed?
There are basically two ways that you can be found in a search engine — through ‘organic’ (unpaid) listings, or through ‘paid’ listings.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the art/science — it’s a bit of both — of capturing natural, ‘organic’ search engine rankings by optimising your business website for indexing by search engine ‘spiders’ (also known as ‘crawlers’ or ‘bots’; they find your site on the internet and index its content).
Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the use of paid advertisements in search engines (such as Google Ads) to drive traffic to your website.
Both SEO and SEM have their place and a good digital marketing strategy incorporates both, but the highest quality traffic will always come from ‘organic’ listings — that’s because those listings represent the best natural match for the user’s search query, and most people accord greater trust to these listings than they do the paid listings. Typically, we are less inclined to click a listing if we know that somebody has paid for the privilege of putting it in front of us.
It stands to reason, then, that your business should try to capture top organic search listings in Google.
But it’s not easy to win those coveted top rankings, particularly if there’s lots of competition in your industry. If you’re serious about ranking prominently, it’s going to take an investment of time and effort (and possibly some money) from your business — and it won’t happen overnight.
So, what’s the secret?
Given that Google’s whole ‘reason for being’ is to link searchers to the very best online content, the secret to getting a top ranking in Google is quite simple:
Produce great content that people want to consume.
Yes, there are other things that you’ll need to do to capture a number 1 position — Google considers over 200 different factors when it ranks pages — but publishing great content is your first step. There’s no way around this, despite what some SEO experts might have you believe.
And once you’ve got the great content in place, then you need to attend to all the other factors that will give your pages the very best chance of success in the search engines — things like: core web vitals, XML sitemaps, TITLE tags, robots.txt, canonical tags, DESCRIPTION tags, 301 redirects, H1s, img ALT tags and backlinks…and so the list goes on.
A fast-track opportunity?
Sounds like a lot work, right?
Well, there’s one thing that can do to fast-track your way to a prominent search engine listing. As a business owner/operator, it’s in your best interests to create a free Google Business Profile at google.com/business.
Creating a profile with Google will ensure that your business can be found in local searches in Google search and Google Maps (think: searches like ‘florist near me’). If you don’t currently have a Google Business Profile, then this is a critical first step to getting listed in Google.
Attend our upcoming workshop for more info
Want to know more about SEO and SEM? We’re running a workshop on 21 June 2022 titled ‘Get your business to the top of Google’.
In the workshop, the South Australian Business Chamber’s digital transformation lead Clayton Wehner will provide you with practical advice about how you can take your business to the top of Google, the undisputed ‘king of the search engines’. The seminar will cover both ‘search engine optimisation’ (SEO), which aims capture top rankings in the organic (unpaid) search results, as well as ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM) and the use of paid Google Ads. You’ll leave with a series of clear, actionable tasks that will help improve your search engine rankings and make your website more prominent online.
